The present invention relates to a data analysis system.
Measurement instruments are applied to execute various measurement tasks in order to measure any kind of physical parameter. As a result of a measurement, measurement data is output by the measurement instrument. Such measurement data may include values of physical parameters such as concentrations of components of a sample, intensity values of a fluorescence measurement, etc. This information can be displayed to a user via a graphical user interface for evaluation of the data.
An example for such a measurement instrument is a coupled liquid chromatography and mass spectroscopy device (for instance the 1200 Series LC/MSD of Agilent Technologies).
DE 10 2007 000 627 A1 discloses a device which has a processing unit, e.g. CPU, for processing of measured data of a liquid chromatography measurement and mass spectrometer measurements such that the processed data are represented in two dimensions. Parameters such as retention time and mass spectrometer-spectrum and characterizing the measurements are represented in dimensions, where the latter parameter is correlated with the former parameter. The processing unit is arranged such that data of an original sample, i.e. fluid sample, and data of fragments of the sample are represented in two dimensions.
Niels-Peter Vest Nielsen, Jens Michael Carstensen, Jon Smedsgaard, “Aligning of single and multiple wavelength chromatographic profiles for chemometric data analysis using correlation optimized warping”, Journal of Chromatography A, 805 (1998) 17-35, discloses that the use of chemometric data processing is becoming an important part of modern chromatography. Most chemometric analyses are performed on reduced data sets using areas of selected peaks detected in the chromatograms, which means a loss of data and introduces the problem of extracting peak data from the chromatographic profiles. These disadvantages shall be overcome by using the entire chromatographic data matrix in chemometric analyses, but it is necessary to align the chromatograms, as small unavoidable differences in experimental conditions cause minor changes and drift. The method uses the entire chromatographic data matrices and does not require any preprocessing, e.g. peak detection. It relies on piecewise linear correlation optimized warping (COW) using two input parameters which can be estimated from the observed peak width. COW is demonstrated on constructed single trace chromatograms and on single and multiple wavelength chromatograms obtained from HPLC diode detection analyses of fungal extracts.
WO 2005/106920 discloses a method of mass spectrometry which comprises determining a first physico-chemical property and a second physico-chemical property of components, molecules or analytes in a first sample, wherein said first physicochemical property comprises the mass or mass to charge ratio and said second physico-chemical property comprises the elution time, hydrophobicity, hydrophilicity, migration time, or chromatographic retention time. A first physico-chemical property and a second physico-chemical property of components, molecules or analytes in a second sample is determined, wherein said first physicochemical property comprises the mass or mass to charge ratio and said second physico-chemical property comprises the elution time, hydrophobicity, hydrophilicity, migration time, or chromatographic retention time. Data relating to components, molecules or analytes in said first sample is probabilistically associated, clustered or grouped with data relating to components, molecules or analytes in said second sample.
For the management of such measurement data, a user interface may be appropriate for visualizing corresponding data items to a user in a way that a technically reasonable evaluation of the measurement data is enabled. In this respect, conventional data analysis systems may be inconvenient in use.